o1 vs Qwen 3
2026 - Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights - free to self-host with no API costs. o1 requires paid API access.
- •o1 has a 200K context window - 2x larger than Qwen 3's 128K. Better for long documents and large codebases.
- •Qwen 3 is open-source: fine-tune it, self-host it, or use any inference provider. o1 is closed-source.
Specs comparison
| o1 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓200K | 128K |
| Input / 1M tokens | $15.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $60.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2024-09 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | o1 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 78.3% | - |
| HumanEval | 92.4% | ~89% |
| SWE-bench Verified | 48.9% | - |
| MMLU | - | ~87% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts.
Strengths
o1
- ✓Best-in-class math and physics
- ✓Strong competitive coding (Codeforces, HumanEval)
- ✓Scientific reasoning (GPQA top performer)
- ✓Multi-step logic and planning
- ✓200K context for long technical documents
Qwen 3
- ✓Exceptional multilingual support (100+ languages)
- ✓Apache 2.0 license - fully open for commercial use
- ✓Multiple size variants from 0.6B to 235B MoE
- ✓Strong math and coding across models
- ✓Leading performance for Chinese language tasks
Which should you choose?
Choose o1 if you need...
- →Math and science problems
- →Competitive programming
- →Complex multi-step reasoning
- →Research assistance
Choose Qwen 3 if you need...
- →Multilingual applications
- →Self-hosted cost-sensitive deployments
- →Custom fine-tuning on domain-specific data
- →Asian market applications